Mentioned in

• I finished Joan Didion’s book

  I finished Joan Didion’s Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and only after finishing it, I read the foreword. I always hesitate reading the foreword before reading the book myself. Most of the time they are written by …

• A way of looking but not joining

  I am reading Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion and in this essay titled Last Words, she has written about Hemingway: The very grammar of a Hemingway sentence dictated, or was dictated by, a certain way of …

• An idea of a novel as a tool for noticing

  I am reading Joan Didion's book Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and she reflects on how she wrote her first novel, Run River, over five years, starting in New York. She had parts of the story that she didn’t know …

• I, you, and we

  I have been noticing for a long time now that using “I” or “you” while writing about ideas makes a big difference. If I use “you” when writing, it sounds like I am positioning the reader in the situation I am …

• Writer's block is simply a failure of ego

  I am reading Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion and she wrote that “All writing is generated by a certain minimum of ego: you must assume a position of authority in saying that the way I'm writing it is …

• Writing is the act of saying I

  I am reading Joan Didion's book Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and in the essay I particularly bought the book for, titled Why I Write, Didion writes: In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing …

• You do not talk about the subject of your work or it vanishes

  I am reading Joan Didion's book Let Me Tell You What I Mean and she wrote about the subject in creative work: This business of the subject is tricky. Whether they are painters or photographers or composers or …